What is Caching?

Caching is an area of a computer’s memory devoted to temporarily storing recently used information. The content, which includes HTML pages, images, files and Web objects, is stored on the local hard drive in order to make it faster for the user to access it, which helps improve the efficiency of the computer and its overall performance.

Most caching occurs without the user knowing about it. For example, when a user returns to a Web page they have recently accessed, the browser can pull those files from the cache instead of the original server because it has stored the user’s activity. The storing of that information saves the user time by getting to it faster, and lessens the traffic on the network.

How does Citrix help to manage caching?

In order for businesses to accomplish caching on a large scale, they need to be able to efficiently process large server loads to avoid any lag time for their users. Policies can be put in place to ensure that cached content is fresh and valid to prevent stale or invalid content from being served to a client. Separate, external cache servers can hold much larger caches of data. If the internal memory cache of an application delivery controller doesn’t have enough storage, caches can be redirected to external cache servers.

Citrix products for application delivery networking offer proven application acceleration tools that make applications run five times faster without compromising the end-user experience. Having the option of a large memory cache offers users a seamless experience, enabling accelerated access to videos, high-res graphics, presentation files, CAD drawings and other large files.